"We ask that the media respect her privacy as well as those of her family and friends at this time," Rudolph said.

Despite Rudolph's request, the paparazzi rapidly tracked Spears down at Malibu's Promises treatment center, and photos of the rehabbing star taking a smoking break surfaced on the Internet Tuesday afternoon.

While he declined to offers specifics on Spears' treatment, Rudolph told E! News' Ryan Seacrest exclusively that the 25-year-old singer was "doing great."

He said that Spears was determined to make recovery her top priority, and that all she wanted was time to rest and get better.

Spears' decision to seek help comes after she briefly checked into a treatment facility in Antigua last week, but departed less than 24 hours later.

On Friday, she returned to Los Angeles, where she took the drastic step of shaving her head and acquiring some new tattoos, before hitting the club circuit in a short, blond wig and sunglasses.

The self-inflicted makeunder capped off months of bizarre behavior from the former pop princess, who admitted in a posting to her Website last month that her recent actions had been "far from perfect."

Spears kicked off her hard-partying regimen shortly after filing for divorce from Kevin Federline in November, an occasion she celebrated by hitting the town without her panties…repeatedly.

In December, she celebrated New Year's Eve by either nodding off (per Rudolph) or collapsing into a "dead faint" (per the New York Post) while on the clock as the host of a Las Vegas bash.

Even those closest to Spears were reportedly powerless to convince the fallen pop star to clean up her act.

In an email to Hollywood.com's That Other Blog last week, Spears' former personal assistant Felicia Culotta wrote that she was "crushed/saddened/heart sick" about the singer's downward spiral.

"WE (as in her Family and nearest and dearest—ALL of whom are NOT on the payroll anymore!!) are doing EVERYTHING in our power to get help for Britney and all in our power to NOT pad the bottom or move the bottom, so when she does indeed hit rock bottom, she'll stand up and walk away from this whole fiasco a new, confident, changed, career driven Britney like we all knew and loved," Culotta wrote.

Just days later, that rock bottom moment came to pass, as the newly bald Spears finally accepted she needed professional help.

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